Manufacturing processes consist of a large number of complexities. These complexities vary from setting of bill of materials to different material handling and processing techniques. These complexities pose logistics and engineering challenges. Some of these challenges include maintaining records of changing engineering designs, information disconnection between the different manufacturing shops and costs incurred in tests and trials. With increasing competition and changing customer needs, the time cycle for product design and development needs to be reduced. Manufacturers are looking for ways to save on manufacturing costs while accelerating product lifecycle management cycles.
A method relating to computational design and modeling is disclosed in Indian Patent Application No. 3456/MUM/2012, filed on Dec. 5, 2012, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. In the platforms area, extensibility is viewed as a plug-n-play integration of components through integration architecture such as a service oriented architecture. In such cases a new component is integrated into the platform by registering its interface with the integration bus provided by the platform. Other components in this platform interact with a new component by using its interface. But, the implementation of the component remains a black box to the other components. Such kind of extensibility is good for a large class of applications but is inadequate for the needs of a platform that supports integrated design of materials, products and manufacturing processes with a strong knowledge engineering and machine learning capability. In such a platform there should be a provision to add support for new materials, products and manufacturing processes seamlessly. Models of materials, components and manufacturing processes should not be black boxes. These models have to be visible to other core components of the platform so that they can be handled in an integrated manner. Knowledge services need to know the ontology elements in terms of which knowledge is expressed. Similarly a data mining component needs to have access to domain model elements in order to interpret data correctly and to place the results in a correct context. An architecture is needed where these models are first class entities in the platform.
Hence, there is a need for a platform that limits the aforementioned drawbacks and integrates elements such as designs of materials, products and manufacturing processes, along with other existing elements in the platform.